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When the first warm days tempt you outdoors for a walk, take time to look at the wild mallows flowers. So soon to vanish in summer’s heat, they cast their light purple beauty wherever they’re permitted to exist. Urbanization has deprived Nature of places where wild herbs and vegetables used to grow, but even the […]

Part IV in a series of 4 on eating and healing with roses. Rosewater is the fragrant liquid left after steaming has extracted roses’ essential oils. Rose essential oil is most expensive – sometimes more costly by weight than gold. Thankfully, rosewater’s price is affordable even to ordinary budgets. Rosewater has been a resource in […]

Those convenient bags of prepared salads are breeding grounds for bacteria, so say scientists from Britain’s University of Leicester. The best defense against inadvertent food poisoning is a hearty and immediate appetite: researchers advise consumers to eat bagged salad as soon as possible after opening the package. The study, published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, found that […]

I’m going to thank Donald Trump Jr. for providing a simple way to visualize our decisions regarding human refugees. He said that we should pretend that “those people” are skittles, not someone we could ever imagine being a loved-one– capable of thought, compassion, joy and loss as we believe of ourselves. In junior Trump’s analogy, […]

Terrorists probably come to mind long before honey when people think of Yemen, but the raw Yemeni honey Balqees had for sale at the recent Masdar Festival was far and away the yummiest honey I ever put in my mouth.

Green Prophets burn lots of calories trying to make the planet a better place, but you can’t do much do-gooding if you’re dead. I’ll share a day in my week as a cautionary tale (and offer a peek into Amman’s excellent, and sometimes culturally surreal, medical system).

There are two good reasons for cooking with turmeric. The first one is that the spice’s attractive yellow color and pungent flavor satisfy the sense of having eaten real food. The second, as folk wisdom has always known, is that it’s good for you. Our previous post on turmeric vs. arthritis offers a wide view […]

Artificial sweeteners may have some complicated side-effects or contra-indications for people with existing health effects. But artificial sweeteners could help people beyond losing weight, cavity prevention and reducing blood sugar: a new study from Israel has found that mannitol, widely used in chewing gum, could slow down the effects of Parksinson’s disease.

It is hard to find a house anywhere in the world that doesn’t have sugar in the pantry, but in Egypt, molasses is the number one sweet treat. This is particularly true of Upper Egypt (the southern half of the country), the site of many sugar cane plantations.

While the United States is completely in bed with companies that manufacture genetically modified organisms (GMOs), countries in other parts of the world are resisting their relentless push to populate the planet with their patented seeds. Turkey is the latest country to ban 26 GMOs following an incident involving the unauthorized entry of genetically modified […]

Where in the world can you drink as much coffee as you like for less than $50 a month? In Tel Aviv, Israel, it turns out. CupsTelAviv has convinced 40 independent businesses in what is arguably the country’s most caffeinated city to allow members of their program to drink as many cups of coffee as […]

Increasing evidence shows that sugar is a natural enemy to the body. “Don’t you think I know how hard it is, honey/To get some “sugar” from the phone,” sings country singer Bonnie Raitt, vividly summing up the difficulty of maintaining a long-distance romance. Sugar represents all that’s sweet and desirable, but in the light of […]

Beauty ads make a plethora of cosmetics virtually irresistible: this lipstick will accentuate your luscious lips and this moisturizer will keep you eternally young and attractive, but there are all kinds of hidden dangers associated with these cosmetics that are very poorly understood – particularly in the Middle East and North Africa region, where regulations […]

If giant plumes of gurgling methane don’t keep you up at night, then try this: England’s chief medical officer recently warned government officials that we are running out of antibiotics that are effective against drug-resistant bacteria. This means that even the most innocuous infections that used to be knocked out by antibiotics could kill us […]

New Nature study research shows that fatal first world, hospital-born diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile can be treated with donor feces. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Transferring feces of a (healthy, tested) donor to the gut of a patient suffering from life-threatening diarrhea. These are cases where the body’s natural, beneficial bacteria are wiped out from many rounds […]

Sugar wax, sugaring or Persian waxing, whatever you want to call it there is an old, tried and true way to wax, naturally. Many beauty regimens do more harm than good as many products contain harsh chemicals including toxins, hormone disruptors and even pesticides! That’s why we have scouted out an ancient Arabic beauty regimen that does […]

In the Middle East, now is the time to buy fresh turmeric root for freezing or planting. Fancy a turmeric smoothie? That’s how my husband gets his daily dose of the deep-yellow, pungent root. When his doctor took him off anti-inflammation medications, I cast around for a natural way to help him cope with the […]

Are Israelis eating a mouthful of pesticides for breakfast? If there’s one food group that Israelis love, it’s vegetables. In fact, all over the Middle East, vegetables are treated with love and presented at table in infinite artful ways. And people are picky about their produce, carefully inspecting each tomato and cucumber before consenting to […]

A SARS-like respiratory illness has claimed the life of a second person from Saudi Arabia, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced. The coronavirus sparked worldwide attention in September when an initial alert was sounded, but now a total of six cases have been reported, two of which have been fatal.

A better device for early breast cancer detection is expected to be available in 2013-2014. Any woman who’s endured the pain and embarrassment of a mammogram would welcome a painless alternative. Even better would be one that doesn’t subject her to radiation. Best would be a device that doesn’t crush her breasts, is radiation-free, and […]